Mars

This must have been the 4th Tuesday in a row for me to get over to the Observatory at Great Ellingham. A great opportunity was taken with good seeing I set about to image Mars. I was not happy with the images taken the previous week, Seeing was very poor and @f20 offered no image stability. So gave it up as a bad job. This Tuesday gone was however a surprising and welcome change. Still low on the horizon at the point of capture. Details teased and flashed with clarity on the screen. Registax processing and some work in Photoshop has revealed a pleasing result. Syrtis Major the largest dark feature demonstrates perfectly the dichotomy of the region as the vast expanse of Arabia Terra extends all the way to the Northern polar cap. Terra Meridiani sweeps across the bottom of the image and out of shot, as Hellas basin also appears bright . Overall I am happy with this image. Visually you can see why astronomers like Giovanni Schiaparelli back in 1877 thought there were canals on the surface. Optical illusions  and the seasonal changes gave this impression of a changing living surface. It was only the Mariner probes in the 60's and 70's that finally dispelled the myths and legends of little green men from Mars.

A bay of rainbows

Without a doubt my favourite area on the lunar surface. Every capture of the bay of rainbows I try to tease out a little more detail. Not the most favourable of seeing as I ran 3000 frames. Processed in registax with my favoured wavelets setting. I think this is the most detail I have managed. My William Optics GT81mm 5 element Apo was the scope of choice with a 2 x barlow and the ZWO ASI120MC camera. Capturing around 40 frames per second for a huge 10.3 Giga bite AVI.

Deep, Deep,Very Deep

My previous post of M97 & M108 required further inspection as I could see numerous faint fuzzies about 20 in all. I have highlighted the brightest in boxes and spent a great deal of time finding a desiganation for them. trawling through known to me and some obscure catalogues like MCG Morphological catalogue of galaxies, Holmber galaxies and the VV catalogue Vorontsov Velyanimov of interacting galaxies.

I was amazed to find a remote galaxy a bright one at that mag 14.6 named

MCG+09-19-018 A galaxy with active galactic nucleus, With a redshift of z=0.03475
we are Looking back time: 467 million light years a new record in distance capture for me.

Position confirmed again by Cartes du Ceil.

My image framed nicely with the glorius M108 shows this rather bright galaxy.

 

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Just when I thought it could not get any better.

 SDSSCGB 24289.1 breaks my distance record with a whopping 2.02 Billion light years. I can safely say that is the first time I have broken the billion light year barrier.

I have framed this small fuzzy against the Owl nebula. Position confirmed again by CDC

 

 

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The best was yet to come.

 

 but my greatest surprise was a 20th mag capture of a distant, sorry I mean VERY VERY VERY distant quasar [VV2006] J111005.6+553532 confirmed in position by Carte du Ceil. This is certainly a record for me that will last a while capturing a z=3.54642 Redshift Quasar an incredible 11.9 Billion yes you read it correctly 11.9 Billion light years away. That equates without a great deal of maths, the light from the earliest universe when it was just 1.7 billion years old. To say I am stunned is an understatement. Framed again against M108 who seems to just get bigger. Is the faintest couple of pixels I have ever captured. No enhancement of this image exept levels & curves in Photoshop.

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I am just wondering what I can do next to top this.

M97 & M108

 First of all this will be my 200th post and I just want to thank all those who are new and regular visitors to my blog.

               Despite being circumpolar for us in the UK and visually through the scope an easily detectable pair I have never imaged The very photogenic pair of M108 & M97.

We will start with M108 (Ngc3556). It seems At 46 million light years away, There is a lot going on with this Barred spiral galaxy.  Viewed nearly edge on from our perspective. Close examintion shows expanding shells of hydrogen gas giving rise to many star forming regions. Chandra X ray observatory also detects a number of X ray sources hinting of an intermediate sized black hole in the galaxies heart.

 

Moving now 10,000 times closer we move within our own galaxy to the aptly named OWL nebula on M97 (Ngc3587) Discovered in 1781 early drawings were likened to an owl and known as that since then. A wonderful example of a planetary nebula, An expanding shell of material thrown off from a dying star around 8000 years ago. The progenitor star is around 14th magnitude and easily visible in my 2 hour capture.

Unfortunatly there seems to be a little interference from the nearby star Merak producing some definatly unwated light rays across the image. Other than that I quite like it .......Twit Twooo........